Twelfth Night Secrets by Jane Feather

fashion. They had been full of excitement, thrilled at the prospect of working together for their country.
    She had seen her brother ride off in the dark hour before dawn . . . and she had never seen him again.
    Oh, the letters had come as he had said they would, and George Howard, an unremarkable dapper gentleman looking like a man of business, had paid regular visits to Devere House in London to receive them.
    Then the letters had ceased.
    She had waited in an agony of anxiety until Howard had come to tell her that Nicholas had been killed in the siege of Elba, and the next morning, his name had appeared among the war dead in the London Gazette . And until that morning in November when Howard and Bedford had visited her in London and told her the truth, she had been left alone with her grief, concentrating on the children, who needed every moment of her time. They had adored Nick,and their own uncomprehending grief had expressed itself in alternating outbursts of rage and long periods of sullen and uncooperative silence. The war in Europe had continued, with shifting alliances, treaties made and broken, and all the while, the threat of the French invasion grew more powerful.
    But things had changed that November morning. If what the men from the Ministry suspected was true, then Julius Forsythe had been using his friendship with Nicholas Devere to betray his own country. And eventually, he had betrayed Nicholas. As Harriet had absorbed this implication, a deep, cold rage had entered her soul, almost superseding her grief. She would be avenged. If this man had been responsible for Nick’s murder in a back alley, he would pay, and she would ensure that he did.
    The twins no longer needed her single-minded attention; they missed their brother, but they were coming out of the worst of their grief. In essence, it was not a difficult task the men were asking of her, just simple observation.
    But now Harriet felt the need to take things further, to dig deeper. She had been intrigued by the indentations on the vellum at the Earl’s secretaire, by the way he had burned the paper, and particularly by the lie hehad told about having no need to do correspondence on this holiday visit. She could simply report that to her contacts and leave the rest to them, but her need for vengeance would not be satisfied by such a passive role. The man who had been responsible for Nick’s death had wormed his way into the affections of her grandfather and had gained the confidence of the children. It was up to her now to expose him for what he was—and as soon as possible. Neither the Duke nor the children should have to bear another loss.
    He would be joining the gentlemen in their various sporting pursuits during the following days, and there would be opportunity aplenty for a thorough investigation of his chamber and possessions.
    Harriet yawned and drained her glass. She snuffed the candles on the mantel and took herself to bed, leaning out to blow the bedside taper before burrowing down into the deep feather mattress behind the thick, sheltering bedcurtains.

    Julius Forsythe was sitting at the desk in his bedchamber as the house slept around him. Thomas had long since helped him into his night robe, poured him a generous measure of cognac, and left him to go tohis own bed, but Julius preferred the night hours for some of the more intellectually demanding aspects of his work. The crackle of the log in the hearth, the occasional creak of a floorboard, and the scuttle of a mouse were the only sounds apart from the scratch of his pen on the vellum.
    Lines of letters and numbers appeared beneath his quill, he made swift notations in the margins, and he occasionally consulted a volume of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English as he decoded the hieroglyphics on the small scrap of paper that had reached him via a carrier pigeon the day before. His response would go on its way by the same method from a pigeon loft in Turl